Daughtered Out

 

The line of Zachariah Taliaferro included four descendants, all of whom were daughters. Obviously, familiarity with that surname in subsequent generations was not owing to Zachariah's line, for he had no son to carry his name forward. In other words, as some in the world of genetic genealogy might put it, Zachariah Taliaferro "daughtered out."

Despite that misfortune in an age when sons were important for many reasons, we still need to get to know each of Zachariah's daughters, for in an era in which families often intermarried, we may see those names appear in future generations. We'll take a tour today of each of those four daughters of Zachariah Taliaferro and his wife Margaret Chew Carter, and include a brief note concerning the surnames each of the daughters adopted upon their own marriage.

The oldest of the four daughters was my direct line, my third great-grandmother Sarah Ann Taliaferro, whom we introduced yesterday. Following her 1803 birth in South Carolina was the 1805 arrival of her sister Lucy Hannah Taliaferro. After a brief break from the customary stairstep fashion, the next Taliaferro daughter, Mary Margaret, made her appearance in 1808. The youngest, Caroline Virginia Taliaferro, arrived another three and a half years later. If there were more children of this couple, I have yet to find them.

While we already are familiar with the name of Sarah's husband—we just spent the past month researching Ozey Robert Broyles' ancestry—it might be helpful to list the spouses of Sarah's sisters. While it is true that some of these southern lines from that earlier era did end up intermarrying over the generations, I have another reason for wanting to list these spouses' names: some of them turn up in local history anecdotes. Of course, during that time period, it is sometimes difficult to research a woman without keeping her in the context of family names.

Sarah's next-younger sister Lucy married a man in 1826 by the name of David Sloan Taylor, son of Joseph and Nancy Sloan Taylor of Pendleton. Theirs was a large family which grew to twelve children, though some which I cannot trace may have died in childhood. While David was said to have accumulated a large fortune before the Civil War, not only his fortunes but his health turned, shortly after the close of the war. He apparently died intestate.

Sarah's second sister, Mary Margaret, married a local attorney destined to be not only a local office holder, but also a three-term American congressman prior to the Civil War. Richard Franklin Simpson's interest in local history likely was passed down to his son, Richard Wright Simpson, whose History of Old Pendleton District provides some guidance on the families he was closely related to in that region.

The youngest daughter of Zachariah Taliaferro and Margaret Chew Carter was Caroline Virginia Taliaferro. Like her older sisters, Caroline married and spent the rest of her life in the Pendleton area of South Carolina's upcountry, where she raised at least four children. Her husband, Henry Campbell Miller, was said in all the census records from 1850 through 1880—the last enumeration before his 1899 death—to have been a farmer, but according to his wife's obituary, he was listed as Dr. H. C. Miller. Caroline predeceased him by several years, dying in 1877 by what her obituary referred to as a "painful accident."

It is interesting to note, in examining the record of American Revolutionary War patriot Zachariah Taliaferro, these four sisters' paternal grandfather, that three of the sisters were named in the genealogical listings in applications for membership to the Daughters of the American Revolution. For some reason, descendants of Lucy Hannah Taliaferro, wife of David Sloan Taylor, do not show among the DAR applications for membership, at least that I can find.

No matter. Even if they couldn't pass down the specific surname of their father, every one of these daughters passed down a Taliaferro legacy to their descendants.

That, however, is not what we are pursuing this month. We want to continue our research journey by pressing further into the past. With that, our next step in the process will be to examine the daughters' father, Zachariah, and what we know about his own siblings.